From Tucson to Oak Creek

Nineteen months after he shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killed six other people at a shopping mall in Tucson, Jared Loughner pleaded guilty to nineteen charges. This means that he won’t get the death penalty; he will spend the rest of his life in prison. That conclusion might either have come sooner or, conversely, not at all, if there had been agreement from the outset about just how mentally unstable Loughner was. An earlier attempt to bring the case to court was forestalled by the question of whether Loughner was even fit to stand trial. It was decided, in the end, that he could do so, thanks to medication and therapy, and a clearer sense, on his part, of what he had done. A psychologist testified that Loughner told her, "I especially cried about the child." The youngest victim, Christina-Taylor Green, was nine.

Loughner’s plea means that there won’t be a full trial. Giffords, who resigned her seat because her recovery was not complete, was travelling, but her husband, Mark Kelly, released a statement (via Time magazine):

We don’t speak for all of the victims or their families, but Gabby and I are satisfied with this plea agreement. The pain and loss caused by the events of January 8, 2011 are incalculable. Avoiding a trial will allow us—and we hope the whole Southern Arizona community—to continue with our recovery and move forward with our lives.

That sounds more than fair. Are we missing anything as a result? Lessons in Loughner’s life, which might also have meant lessons in mental health-care in America; reflections on the shape violent fantasies take within a culture, and perhaps on how a woman in public life becomes a target; a discussion about guns. (Read Jill Lepore on Trayvon Martin for more on that last one.) But all of those conversations are not only possible outside of the framework of a trial for Loughner; they are necessary. His plea came two and a half weeks after James Holmes, armed with an assault rifle and other guns, allegedly killed twelve people at the midnight showing of the new Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, and just two days after Wade Page killed six people at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, in Oak Creek.

How different are these stories? They are, of course, not identical, but the ways they diverge are telling, too. Has the reaction to the Sikh temple shooting been more muted because it wasn’t also part of a Hollywood story—the biggest movie of the year, whose opening would have been on the front pages anyway—or because more Americans could picture themselves in a multiplex than in a house of worship for a religion not their own? If the latter is the case, that might be cause for at least a slight sense of abashment, if not shame. Do we think that Holmes’s dyed-red hair is more culturally revealing than Page’s tattoos, with their white-supremacist iconography—and if so, why?

In the first minutes and hours after the news from Tucson, there were many voices drawing connections to the tone of the political discourse, which has, then and now, become unhinged. (Those voices were published here, too.) When Loughner’s madness became clear, there were rebukes—complaints that all the talk of politics were irrelevant, and even inappropriate: this was just the freak appearance of one mad man. What about now, when Page does appear to not only have held certain political beliefs which may well have been connected to his actions, but to have been connected, through the band he played in and other affiliations, to white-supremacist and Nazi groups? (We don’t know his exact motives, but we’re getting a sense.) It is hard to take comfort in the idea that he was an isolated phenomenon when he also appears to have made no secrets of these connections when serving in the military. (Stars and Stripes quotes soldiers who served with him, who, when he was discharged, were only surprised that drinking was what ended his military career, and not his extremism.) Can we ask, finally, how our response to 9/11, and the tolerance for hostility to Islam that followed, has fuelled this? (The answer is not to just keep pointing out that Sikhs are mistaken for Muslims, which carries the dark implication that it would have somehow made more sense if Page had sought out a mosque.)

Loughner’s delusions, we were told, rendered Tucson apolitical. What does that make Oak Creek?

Photograph by Bill Robles/AP/Corbis.

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a New Yorker staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.